41 research outputs found
Human Shape Estimation using Statistical Body Models
Human body estimation methods transform real-world observations into predictions about human body state. These estimation methods benefit a variety of health, entertainment, clothing, and ergonomics applications. State may include pose, overall body shape, and appearance.
Body state estimation is underconstrained by observations; ambiguity presents itself both in the form of missing data within observations, and also in the form of unknown correspondences between observations. We address this challenge with the use of a statistical body model: a data-driven virtual human. This helps resolve ambiguity in two ways. First, it fills in missing data, meaning that incomplete observations still result in complete shape estimates. Second, the model provides a statistically-motivated penalty for unlikely states, which enables more plausible body shape estimates.
Body state inference requires more than a body model; we therefore build obser- vation models whose output is compared with real observations. In this thesis, body state is estimated from three types of observations: 3D motion capture markers, depth and color images, and high-resolution 3D scans. In each case, a forward process is proposed which simulates observations. By comparing observations to the results of the forward process, state can be adjusted to minimize the difference between simulated and observed data. We use gradient-based methods because they are critical to the precise estimation of state with a large number of parameters.
The contributions of this work include three parts. First, we propose a method for the estimation of body shape, nonrigid deformation, and pose from 3D markers. Second, we present a concise approach to differentiating through the rendering process, with application to body shape estimation. And finally, we present a statistical body model trained from human body scans, with state-of-the-art fidelity, good runtime performance, and compatibility with existing animation packages
The Informed Sampler: A Discriminative Approach to Bayesian Inference in Generative Computer Vision Models
Computer vision is hard because of a large variability in lighting, shape,
and texture; in addition the image signal is non-additive due to occlusion.
Generative models promised to account for this variability by accurately
modelling the image formation process as a function of latent variables with
prior beliefs. Bayesian posterior inference could then, in principle, explain
the observation. While intuitively appealing, generative models for computer
vision have largely failed to deliver on that promise due to the difficulty of
posterior inference. As a result the community has favoured efficient
discriminative approaches. We still believe in the usefulness of generative
models in computer vision, but argue that we need to leverage existing
discriminative or even heuristic computer vision methods. We implement this
idea in a principled way with an "informed sampler" and in careful experiments
demonstrate it on challenging generative models which contain renderer programs
as their components. We concentrate on the problem of inverting an existing
graphics rendering engine, an approach that can be understood as "Inverse
Graphics". The informed sampler, using simple discriminative proposals based on
existing computer vision technology, achieves significant improvements of
inference.Comment: Appearing in Computer Vision and Image Understanding Journal (Special
Issue on Generative Models in Computer Vision
Model-free Consensus Maximization for Non-Rigid Shapes
Many computer vision methods use consensus maximization to relate
measurements containing outliers with the correct transformation model. In the
context of rigid shapes, this is typically done using Random Sampling and
Consensus (RANSAC) by estimating an analytical model that agrees with the
largest number of measurements (inliers). However, small parameter models may
not be always available. In this paper, we formulate the model-free consensus
maximization as an Integer Program in a graph using `rules' on measurements. We
then provide a method to solve it optimally using the Branch and Bound (BnB)
paradigm. We focus its application on non-rigid shapes, where we apply the
method to remove outlier 3D correspondences and achieve performance superior to
the state of the art. Our method works with outlier ratio as high as 80\%. We
further derive a similar formulation for 3D template to image matching,
achieving similar or better performance compared to the state of the art.Comment: ECCV1